WHAT I OWE TO TAGORE AND GANDHI
When
a people come into their own after centuries of alien domination, many
complexes develop. One of the most common is the urge to run down everything
associated with foreign rule so as to boost one’s own morale. In our country
there are many who believe patriotically that all our faults and shortcomings
are due largely, if not wholly, to foreign education.
Unlike
these patriotic countrymen, I take no pride in disowning whatever good I
derived from my education, whether in
All
the same, as the years passed and I looked back, I found the backyard of my
mind choked with weeds. The seeds and seedlings
brought from abroad, though good in themselves, were obviously not well suited
to the soil in which they were transplanted, nor to
the climate and atmosphere in which they were nurtured. Why else would the
fruit, sweet and wholesome in
Turning
away from myself I looked at another type deemed very authentic because very
indigenous. I met learned men and holy men stuffed choke-full with ancient
Indian lore and totally oblivious of the world outside and around them. I found
the fruit of their learning and wisdom hard to bite, and the flowers seemed to
have lost their bloom ages ago. These worthies were loaded with the heirlooms
and curios of the past and were so pleased with themselves
that they had no mind to look around or ahead. I turned away from their sight
with even more distaste than I had turned away from the wasteland of my own
mind.
What
then is true education, I asked myself. How can knowledge or culture, whether
borrowed from one’s own past or from outside, be made one’s own and made to
live and grow and yield a harvest that will taste sweet and be wholesome?
The
answer came by watching at work Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath
Tagore. Here were two Indians who had taken freely
from their country’s past as well as from the West, and whose minds, though
otherwise as unlike as two minds can be, had borne rich flower and fruit,
sweet-smelling and nourishing, and at once truly Indian and universal. How was
it that the same seeds and seedlings that had borne such a rich harvest in them
had turned into little better than weeds in the jungle of my mind and the minds
of thousands of my countrymen, though many of them were hardly aware of the
wasteland within them? What was there in the spirit of Gandhi and Tagore that transformed whatever
they took from outside, whether from the heritage of their own
land or from other lands, into something rich and living and made it their own?
Then
for the first time I dimly understood the meaning of the much ill-used word,
creative. These two men, however unlike otherwise, were truly creative–not as
individual freaks but as representative Indians, bringing to the surface and
making evident, in a new incarnation as it were, the submerged collective
genius of their people. Watching them and brooding on their many affinities and
contrasts, it seemed to me that here were the two authentic faces of that ageless
spirit of
Tagore passed away in early
August of 1941. Jawaharlal Nehru was then in Dehradun
jail. A few days after the poet’s death I received a letter from him, duly
censored and passed by the jailer, in the course of which Nehru wrote: “Both Gurudev (honoured teacher, as Tagore was known to the boys of his school at Santiniketan) and Gandhiji took
much from the West and from other countries, specially Gurudev.
Neither was narrowly national. Their message was for the world. And yet both
were 100 per cent
The
differences, often so sharp as to seem contrasts, were indeed very marked–in
almost everything, from birth, upbringing and way of living, to temperament,
talent and taste. Almost everything that can keep two human beings apart was
there to alienate them from one another. Had one of them been less great
and wise, and had either of them failed to understand intuitively that the
other was different because he represented the other face of India, they would
have misjudged one another and misjudged harshly, as indeed did many of their
admirers. But they knew that the Indian sadhana
or the way of realising the truth of life was
two-fold, through tapasya or penance
and sacrifice, and through ananda, a
joyous acceptance of the fullness of life as partaking of the divine. In a
letter of January 1929 addressed to Gandhiji’s
English disciple Miss Slade (Mira Bhen), after she
had paid a visit to Santiniketan, Tagore
wrote: “Human life has its two aspects–one is the discipline of truth and the
other is the fullness of expression. Sabarmati
represents that discipline of truth, for Mahatmaji is
born with the pure life of truth, his nature is one with it. Being a poet my
mission is to inspire life’s fullness of expression, and I hope Santiniketan carries that ideal in all its
activeness….According to the Upanishads, the reconciliation of the
contradiction between tapasya and ananda is at the root of creation, and Mahatmaji is the prophet of tapasya
and I am the poet of ananda.”
It
was this inmate awareness that they complemented rather than contradicted one
another that kept them close in spirit, across the chasm of many differences
that seemed to separate them. They shared in common a great love of
their country as well as of humanity, and believed passionately
that the good of India was in harmony with the good of humanity, that the
merely patriotic man was an incomplete man. But even when they were united by a
common love and faith, their temperamental reactions and their ways of approach
to life and nature diverged so much that their love and faith assumed very
different shapes. A study of the bewildering varieties of shapes thus assumed
would help one to understand the two faces of the most creative phase of modern
India. To have known them and watched them in action was the greatest privilege
of my life.